Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  The bottle appeared, and circled, and was emptied, and still he hadn’t arrived. Other couples had long since drifted off into the darkness and were already beginning to straggle back to the fire. The fire itself was sinking to embers. I saw my plan twist and snarl like a tangled warp, and my mind raced back and forth through a now-familiar maze of worry and indignation.

  Finally, half an hour before our father was due to pick us up, Eli appeared. I had given up on him and was standing, tense and seething, by the waning bonfire, when some instinct made me turn to look behind me. He was strolling up the moonlit walk as though he had no reason to hurry. When he saw me watching him, he lifted his arm and pointed his forefinger at me as though he were shooting a gun or choosing a prize. It was an intimate gesture, both ironic and proprietorial, and usually it would have delighted me. But before he reached me, he stopped to talk to a group of people standing back from the ebbing fire.

  “Hey, Eli,” I heard them say. I heard his voice answering, heard the first low notes rise from his harmonica, and I turned back to face what fire was left with tears burning in my eyes like acid. As my blurred vision melted the flames, I suddenly realized I had no right to feel hurt or angry, no right to complain or be indignant. Our relationship was that undefined. We couldn’t even fight. We had never even admitted the bond that would make a fight possible. In some way we were more remote than strangers because strangers at least have the possibility of yet unmade connections.

  I stared into the fire until the flames reassembled themselves and my eyes reabsorbed their tears, and when he finally drifted over, I was in an animated conversation with someone else. When I heard the honk of my father’s horn, I managed to say good-bye to the group without ever acknowledging Eli’s glance, and I made myself skip across the grass towards the waiting truck as though he had never crossed my mind.

  “Because,” I said again, in lame answer to my father’s question, “we’ll need food.”

  “I think we’re pretty well stocked for a month or so,” he said, “especially with the garden doing so well.”

  “But there’s people we should say good-bye to,” I blurted.

  “Anyone in particular?” I knew he was trying to lighten the blow of having to stop our only entertainment, but his joke was the perfect seed crystal for my frustration.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell us before now?”

  “Why, Nell, I didn’t know myself until I tried to buy gas again tonight. And then Jerry told me there hadn’t been any in Redwood in two weeks.”

  “See—you should have known. If you’d been paying any attention to anything but yourself, you would have known.”

  In the silence that followed I was vaguely aware of Eva’s gasp. Then my father spoke, and his voice sounded more weary than ever.

  “You’re probably right, and I’m sorry. But don’t worry, Pumpkin. Your young man won’t forget you. Or if he does,” my father continued, “he wasn’t worth a spider’s fart in a rain forest to begin with.”

  “He’s not my young man and I’m not your goddamn pumpkin,” I said, flat and hard and loud. I could feel the truck awash with my father’s baffled hurt and my own mean pain, and I have to admit it felt exhilarating to be that angry, to be flooded by an emotion that didn’t threaten to wash me away.

  I could have fixed it. It wouldn’t have taken much—a word, a joke, a gesture. I could have put my hand on his knee, could have laid my head on his shoulder, could have said “I’m sorry.” But instead I sat stiff and untouchable, glad that for once I could be the one to shut someone out.

  We went to town once more after that awful night. It was near the end of August, less than six months ago, though now it seems as remote as a dream dreamed in another lifetime. Nine Saturdays had passed since we had last been to Redwood. We hadn’t had power in five months, the phone hadn’t rung in at least four, but still we talked as though by fall—or winter at the latest—everything would be restored.

  For a few days our father had been doing some calculating in the pantry and the garden, and one night as we were eating supper, he said, “Girls, I think we’d better go to town tomorrow. We’re running short on supplies and the sooner we restock, the better. I hate to use the gas, but I think we’ve got enough to make it into Redwood and back. Anyway,” he sighed, “we have to try.”

  That night I heated extra water to wash my hair. I shaved my legs and plucked my eyebrows, and ironed my green sundress as well as I could by warming our electric iron on the stovetop.

  As I ironed, Father counted his money.

  “Good thing I got this out when I did,” he said as he spread four hundred-dollar bills out on the table like a winning hand of poker. “The bank closed two days later,” he remembered, and shook his head. “Wish I could have got to our savings account, too.”

  Eva added seventy-three dollars to the pile. I gave him fifty-nine.

  We had no way of knowing if that were a lot or a little. “Of course I’ll pay it back, girls,” he said, carefully writing out IOU’s for each of us on the backs of old envelopes. “Soon as the bank opens up and I can get at my savings you’ll have it back. With interest.”

  We were all up early the next morning, and when we set off, I felt like a girl out of a fairytale, a country girl going into town for market day, going to see the sights, to hear the music and taste the treats, maybe to buy a ribbon or a new ring, a girl making the long trip to town to see her sweetheart.

  There can be no excitement greater than that, no other morning sweet as that one, steeped in pure, declarative joy: I was going to town. The sun was warm. I was wearing my green sundress. My hair was light on my bare shoulders. I would see Eli.

  Despite my high spirits, the land beyond our clearing seemed oddly foreign. Already the road was starting to show signs of disuse. Weeds grew in the fresh breaks and slides, and down the middle of the road ran a widening wale of grasses that slapped and scratched at the undercarriage of the truck.

  Four miles from home, we reached the house of our nearest neighbors. The Colemans were Fundamentalist Christians, and Father used to claim they were the perfect neighbors for us because we had absolutely nothing in common—not even a property boundary since the state forest land snaked in between us. But their once tidy house now looked ransacked. The windows were smashed, the front door hung by one hinge, and the grass in the yard was sparse and brown.

  “Wait here,” our father said. He grabbed the rifle, and we sat in the cab while he walked up to the house and called inside.

  “They’re gone,” was all he said when he got back. “Looks like a sow’s been farrowing in there.”

  “Where are they?” I whispered.

  He shrugged. “Maybe they’ve moved to town.”

  Three miles beyond the Colemans’, we reached the paved county road. As the truck picked up speed, we spoke less and less and our voices became hushed as if we were in a museum or at a funeral. Several of the houses we passed were burnt to the ground or obviously looted. A skinny dog ran out barking from a shed with boarded-over windows. Finally, a few miles outside of town, we saw a tenuous wisp of smoke rise from a chimney.

  As we neared Redwood, we noticed a few more signs of life, a woman hanging washing on a line, a grim-faced man on a bicycle, a handful of children who stopped their game of chase to watch us drive past. Still, even in the bright summer morning, the countryside had the pinched and stretched feeling of a region under siege.

  Finally Eva spoke. “What’s going on?”

  Our father cleared his throat. “We’ll find out.”

  But there was little enough to find out. Although there were a few cars and pickups parked by the curbs, ours was the only vehicle on the road as we turned onto Main Street. All the shops surrounding the Plaza were darkened. Some displayed “Closed” signs, and some even had little clocks in their windows, with their hands pointing to 10 o’clock, as though tomorrow their well-dressed proprietresses would return and unlock their doors. Other windows w
ere shrouded with sheets of butcher paper or plywood, and a few were broken, their jagged holes opening on emptiness.

  As we drove past the Uptown, I peered through its windows to see posters peeling from the walls, the jukebox on its side, and the tables upended. Across the street, the Plaza was deserted. Its once lush grass was dry and clotted with weeds and all the streetlights had been shot out. Only the trees still looked the same.

  “Where is everybody?” whispered Eva. No one mentioned that our father had said the country people would have moved here, too.

  Father said, “Think I’ll swing by Jerry’s and see what he knows.”

  Jerry Miller was Redwood Elementary’s sixth-grade science and math teacher and one of our father’s best friends. Jerry was a large, quiet man who had left a position at MIT because he loved kids and hated politics, and every Friday night for years he and Father had stopped to drink a beer together before Father drove home to the forest for the weekend.

  Jerry’s wife was a lawyer down in the city, and since she and my mother had never been able to figure out how to spend a comfortable evening in each other’s company, our families didn’t get together often, though Eva and I always enjoyed the rare times we spent at their house, swimming in their pool while the adults talked on the patio and their voices floated down around us.

  The Millers lived a few blocks from the grade school in the only really prosperous neighborhood in Redwood. But when we drove down those curving streets, the long front lawns were brown and ragged, and jacked-up or tireless cars were propped by the curbs.

  Father swung into the weedy circular drive in front of the Millers’ tile-roofed house. He turned the truck off, but before he could open his door, a man came out of the house to meet us. He was scowling, and he held a shotgun pointed down at the ground by his side.

  Father leaned out the window. “Hello,” he said in the firm public voice of a grade school principal.

  The man nodded.

  “Mr. Miller around?” asked Father.

  The man shook his head. “How about Mrs. Miller?”

  Again the man shook his head. “Nope,” he said.

  “Uh-hum,” Father nodded, as though it all made sense. “You wouldn’t happen to know where they went, would you? Jerry is a friend of mine.”

  “Think they might of gone south.”

  “Down to the city maybe? Where Mrs. Miller works?”

  “Maybe.”

  “When did they leave?”

  “Don’t know. Before we got here.”

  “And when was that?”

  The man shrugged.

  “So you’re caretaking for the Millers until they get back?” The man glared and jerked the gun barrel an inch or two off the ground.

  “Well,” Father said, still casually, “guess we’ll be going.”

  The man nodded.

  Instead of driving past him, Father backed the truck down the driveway, and we rode off in silence, trying not to imagine where the Millers might have gone, trying not to imagine what had happened to them or when we would see them again.

  Finally Father spoke. “I suppose I’d better see how the school’s doing,” he said, and we drove those few blocks in a dream, dazed by the film of strangeness that overlaid those familiar streets.

  When we reached Redwood Elementary, Father pulled up beside the empty flagpole, and we sat in the truck, studying the place that had for years been his second home.

  The front doors were chained together, and the long line of classroom windows were boarded over.

  “Mike must have done that,” Father said, referring to the custodian who had worked there longer than even he had. “Maybe Jerry helped him before they left.”

  We gazed across the open expanse of schoolyard to the empty play equipment. A rope hung ominously from the monkey bars, and the chains that once held the swing seats dangled vacantly. There were no children anywhere.

  After a long moment, Father put the truck back in gear.

  “Aren’t we going in?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “there’s nothing I can do there now. Besides, I think we’d better finish our business and head back home as soon as we can.”

  After another silence he added, “I’d love to find someone we know and maybe get some news. But I can’t think of anyone I trust who lives close by. And we can’t afford to waste any more gas driving around—the trip home is iffy enough as it is.”

  Ever since Father had said we were going to town, I had been cherishing an image of Redwood as the bustling center of a new—if temporary—society. I had pictured the Plaza thronging with people and ringed with booths like an outdoor market. I imagined farmers selling squawking chickens, fresh eggs, and homegrown vegetables, peddlers hawking pretty trinkets and used tools. I had pictured street musicians, food vendors, and shoppers with baskets on their arms, stopping to bargain and gossip. I was even imagining carts and horses, as though, while we were waiting for the life we had known to start back up again, everyone had decided to play at returning to a quaint and picturesque older world.

  For so long it had been my assumption that if only I could somehow travel those thirty-two miles to town, if only I could cover the distance between our clearing and the Plaza, then I would see Eli, and that if only I could see him, everything would be right between us. But the empty Plaza crystallized the realization that had slowly been seeping through me: I wouldn’t see Eli. I had no idea where he lived or how to try to find him. I couldn’t call him. And I couldn’t draft Eva and my father into spending our time and gas searching for him. Besides, I had no idea if he was still in town. I couldn’t even be sure he was still alive.

  And even if I did manage to find him, what then? The last time I had seen him I pretended to ignore him. Suddenly I realized that my hopes for Eli had been as unreal as my visions of market day. I had no idea who Eli was. All I had known were my fantasies, and now they, too, were gone, choked and withered as the grasses of the vacant Plaza.

  A blinding anger swept over me. I wanted to strike out, to be as cruel to someone else as life had been to me. I sat stunned, hardly breathing, trying to think of some hurtful thing to say to my father or my sister, trying to think of a way of making them suffer, too. But in the end I said nothing and only rode, anguished and empty, through the grim streets of Redwood.

  Father drove to the Savewell grocery first, but its doors were boarded over, as were the doors of the rival supermarket by the padlocked post office.

  “Maybe everything’s closed,” whispered Eva.

  “Could be,” our father answered, squaring his shoulders. He glanced at the gas gauge and then drove to the far edge of town, to the Fastco warehouse.

  Fastco was the only discount outlet to have ventured into remote little Redwood, and although there were a number of locals who refused to enter it, it drew shoppers enough to keep it crowded. Everything in Fastco came packaged in enormous quantities—dishwashing soap in gallon containers, flour in fifty-pound sacks. Our father called it “Industrial Strength Shopping,” and he used to delight in teasing Mother about the size of the packages of toilet paper she brought home. When he discovered you had to buy a membership to shop there, he loved to explain that “Here in America, we now get to pay for the privilege of shopping.”

  Back in those days, the Fastco parking lot was always crowded with carts and cars and kids. But today, except for a few sorry-looking vehicles scattered across the vast expanse of asphalt, the lot was empty. The store windows were dark, and the signs taped to them advertising sales on canned tuna fish and fresh asparagus and fabric softener were faded and torn. We parked anyway, climbed out of the truck, and waited while Father dug a flattened roll of duct tape out of the glove box. Together we walked towards the warehouse.

  “Is it open?” asked Eva as we reached the unresponsive electronic door.

  Father paused for an almost imperceptible second, and then said, “Only one way to find out.” He pushed against the door and it yielded, openi
ng into the echoing warehouse, chilly and lofty as a cathedral. We stood just inside the door for a moment, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the lack of light. High above us in the ceiling, beyond the network of steel struts, a few fiberglass skylights let in a faint smear of daylight.

  “Anyone here?” called Father.

  “You bet,” came a hearty voice from the darkness. “There’s not much left, but as long as you pay cash for it, it’s yours.”

  It was a shock to see that giant warehouse so dark and empty. The wide aisles were deserted. There were no harried mothers pushing carts filled with cases of disposable diapers and boxes of sugared cereals. There were no retired couples stocking up on birdseed or booze. There were no forklifts sweeping around the corners of the displays.

  And there seemed to be no food. The shelves that reached from the concrete floor halfway up to the distant ceiling were all but bare. What we could make out on them looked more like trash than groceries, some heaps and scattered piles of junk, a few crushed boxes and flattened cans.

  “We’re too late,” whispered Eva. “There’s nothing left.”

  But Father was already at work, untangling a shopping cart from the collection at the front of the store. He pushed it towards the first aisle with a show of his old determination. “There’s plenty left,” he called back to us with a purposefulness that felt contagious. “We just have to hunt for it. Grab yourselves a shopping cart, girls, and follow me.”

  We began the once-familiar ritual walk up and down those aisles and soon saw that Father was right—here and there, on the great sheets of plywood that served as shelves a little salvageable food remained.

  The aisle we entered first had once been stocked with baking goods. Now, strewn at random over the shelves were a dozen or so pint bottles of imitation vanilla extract, some packages of paper liners for muffin tins, and several institutional-sized containers of garlic salt and baking powder.